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A Full Circle: I Work on LinkedIn Learning, Thanks to Lynda.com

September 26, 2016

Back when I was in college, I approached the Intuit table at a job fair, a company I desperately wanted an internship at. Sensing my enthusiasm, the Intuit recruiter there gave me a chance by granting me an interview for a software engineering internship the following morning.

Great news, right? The only problem – the interview involved a one-hour technical screening. And I had just picked up computer science as a major that semester, meaning I had yet to actually take the courses needed to perform well.

My salvation? Lynda.com, specifically Simon Allardice’s Foundations of Programming: Data Structures class. I spent that night committing it to memory, learning the amount of material taught in a semester-long university course during one epic all-nighter.

Thanks to that class, the technical screening went smoothly and I got the internship at Intuit, but my relationship with Lynda.com didn’t end there. During that internship, I consulted Lynda.com almost daily, using it to sharpen my coding and to improve my UI.

Flash forward to today, where I still work with Lynda.com and now LinkedIn Learning, but in a much different way. Instead of the learning platform making me better, I now work as a software engineer on LinkedIn's learning team, doing everything I can to make it better.

It’s crazy – I now contribute to the very product that got me to where I am today, using the software development skills it helped me gain!

What Lynda.com and LinkedIn Learning means to me

As mentioned, I didn’t start as a computer science major in college. I started as a biomedical engineering student, and only decided to get into computer science in the last semester of my senior year.

Lynda.com allowed me to do that and still be successful. It allowed me to learn the skills necessary to secure a software engineering internship at Intuit, and then continued to give me the skills necessary to thrive in that role.

In other words, Lynda.com gave me more freedom. It meant I wasn’t stuck with a decision I made when I was 18, and empowered me to quickly reach my goal.

This past Thursday, we launched LinkedIn Learning. The platform combines the world-class network of LinkedIn and the world-class content of Lynda.com to create a personalized, transformative learning experience.

Clearly, the launch was a big day for the company, generating dozens of news articles and representing our big “next play” in the learning space. But it was also a big day for me, personally.

Because to me, LinkedIn Learning ensures more people won’t have to feel like they are stuck with their original major, or that it’s too late to pick up a new hobby or skill needed to achieve their goals. It allows people to explore passions at any time, while knowing that there is a community there to support them.

Bottom line, it means more choice and more opportunity for more people. And I know first-hand how powerful that can be.